irrational juxtaposition
by a theoretic revolution
Summary: She's the Caesar to my Brutus, I guess. -marceline, bubblegum


|_irrational juxtaposition_|

10101

* * *

Name: Marceline Aberdeen

Age: Immortal; over 1,000 years old (estimated to be 1,437)

Gender: Female

Species: Vampire (Queen)

Relationship Status: Single

Personal Status: Friend?

* * *

Marceline and I are friends, I suppose, though to describe our relationship in that single word would be highly inaccurate. A more correct portrayal would perhaps be 'frenemies' - word mashing is cool, she says - as in 'friend enemies.' It's more of an Aberdeen Colloquialism than anything (and various things about Marceline deserve capital letters), but it fits surprisingly well. Like the cellular structure of a _Cuppediae Sapiens_ (a Latin word, by the way, because Latin is the ubiquitous language for naming all things scientific), 'frenemies' is the glorious juxtaposition of two otherwise unlikely terms into a single, contradictory word which comes close to elaborating upon our frenemyship - or, at lease close to reaching such a all-encompassing zenith.

Marceline isn't particularly fond of zeniths because they have too much of a solar connotation for her, she explains, but I'm veering off on a tangent again.

We get along fairly well. To observe our relationship from the perspective of a genealogist, we both share certain ancestral roots that can be traced back to the War, in that we both resulted from the radiocative incursion that mutated various non-living objects into suddenly living, breathing organisms; for me, I became Bubblegum, while she developed rather unnaturally, diverging into vampirism without a very structured explanation. The formation of the vampire gene is something that still eludes me after hours of research, as does its transformative properties, and the appearance of Unfounded Locations like the Nightosphere are baffling. Marceline's roots are about as befuddeling as the digestive tract of a _Cupeddiae Canus _(which is inacurrate Latin, I know), and yes, I also realize that I'm off on another tangent.

Suffice it to say, both of us are genetic aberrations; anomalies, if you will, though Marceline believes we're merely a form of natural evolution that was simply sped up by the after-effects of the War. A lighter term, and just as scientifically appealing, but I still prefer 'aberration.' A bit pejorative, but there's something highly enticing about deviation, I've discovered.

* * *

Favorite Color: Red (the unanimous favorite color of all vampiric entities, apparently)

Diet: Varying shades of red taken from any organic/inorganic substance

Favorite Musical Genre(s): Punk Rock, Death Metal

* * *

Marceline and I are frenemies, not friends, because the latter isn't quite as extensive as the former. She likes to wear grey matched with red, skinny jeans, and snakeskin boots with shiny silver spurs shaped like nebulous suns with radiating solar flares. Her pallor is always ashen, but she doesn't smell like death, contrary to certain vampire misconceptions; instead, her natural perfume most closely resembles a blend of anise, ginger, and nutmeg, clean and earthy. Her incisors are exactly one inch long, her irises are red, if you look quite closely, she likes to sleep in checkerboard blankets (when she does sleep), screw around with mortals for fun, and hang out with Nightosphere ghost gangs in dingy bars and drink Hellfire, a unique blend of absinthe and magma that she says jolts through your veins like electricity and sends you into some kind of ecstatic purgatory where your deepest fantasies become your nightmares and your nightmares are transmutated into the most pleasant dreams you could ever fathom.

Marceline and I are rather simple, actually. Sometimes, we have slumber parties like regular girls in which we discard the roles of Princess and Vampire Queen and lounge around on my bed or on her cave mattress, flick through cheap magazines, laugh at our own poor taste, and ogle the shirtless males for what seems like hours, because really, that's what we do and we don't care if it sounds ridiculous. She's the Caesar to my Brutus, I guess, the Jake to my Finn (a completely accurate comparison), the electron to my proton and the paradoxical death to my genetically mutated lifeform. Her t-shirt smells like cloves and I wear it when I go to bed because it smells like her and altogether, Marceline doesn't smell too bad for an eternal, 1,000 year old queen of damnation. Damnation smells like spices and sugar, in fact, which is a good smell.

She summons the dead from their graves on moonlit nights with a few mystical conjurations done in Higher Science (which is the correct term for so-called 'magic') and I summon the dead with a temporal reconfiguration potion distilled with a glucose restoration transfusion. It's the same difference, wherein her verses of invocation are replaced by my beakers and test tubes filled with highly volatile material bubbling like fresh ectoplasma. Her darkly romantic ballads are my poorly written medieval fiction, her hellbound raves are my science concertos, her perfectly preserved formaldehyde wolf's mane is my gum headpiece, her surrogate father's amulet of Dark Power is the counterpart to my crown. She's the anarchy to my monarchy, the artisan to my scientist, the entropy to my order. We clash that way, but we behave like magnets drawn together by reverse polarity, so in the end, it all works out harmoniously.

Marceline and I, we aren't magnets, necessarily, we aren't apples and oranges or dissonance and consonance or tragedy and comedy, we're just friends, and sometimes it's hard to see that through our vindictive gesturing and public posturing, but really, we're two girls with a mutual love for rockers wearing silver pentagrams and her High Science is something to admire, so we glide over the fluctuations in our coordinate plane and move on in our pre-calculated trajectory.

* * *

Weapon of Choice: Axe Bass

Abilities: Pyrokinesis, Shapeshifting, Telekinesis, Illusion-casting, Vampirism Transferral, etc.

Level (in relation to BMO's Video Game Ranking Hierarchy: Level 100/100 (analysis courtesy of Finn, Jake, and BMO)

* * *

I lie in her cavern villa, on the checkerboard mattress, in pajama shorts and the shirt she lent me, and perform calculations with my notes splayed around me like tiles while she hovers nearby, bass hooked up to a synthesizer and playing aimless chords. Her fridge is full of cherry sodas and tomato juice and pomegranates, her breadbox is stuffed full of jelly donuts and apples. Everything about Marceline's room radiates subtle Spartan architecture and furnishing, coupled with her fondness for vintage furniture and her generally discordant bedroom layout. Her fingernails are the chitinous midnight sheen of beetle wings, her jeans are patchwork and faded, her sneakers are salvaged relics from a collapsed building that might have been a local gathering place before it crumbled like vermicelli structures under the weight of five chemistry textbooks. It's hard to tell; Marceline is an eclectic blend of various cultures and fashion tastes, she is the quintessential Hipster Bitch that everyone is supposed to dislike at first glance because of her Hipster Swagger and her Hipster Vibes polluting the mainstream air with noxious pretentiousness, and yet, she's not a Hipster Bitch at all, she's 'radical' (as Finn would say [radical: a Finn Colloquialism, which is also deserving of capitals]), she's flower power and grunge, she composes sentimental love ballads that border on the kitschy and sentimental love ballads that make you want to cry your eyes out, even though that's anatomically impossible; your tear ducts wouldn't be able to produce enough water and at a high enough velocity to propel your eyeballs from their sockets, nor would they be capable of producing tears corrosive enough to sever the flesh around the organs, thus resulting in them falling out of their own accord (yes, tangent again, I a aware).

Her house is mostly devoid of decoration besides band poster tributes, shrines of red and black candles flickering dimly like trapped fireflies, while this grim but soothing incandescence spins all around us. Absently, I may remark to her about the state of the Candy Kingdom, perhaps diverge into politics, and Marceline will still play her chords but slower, quieter, as she nods her head along to the cadence of my words, occasionally snapping her fingers and calling drinks to our location from the refrigeration unit, whereupon I will pop open the tap, take a sip, thank her for it, and she will give a different nod that subtly says, "Thanks" whilst strumming along to some melancholy tune, her can suspended beside her head.

Her music when we sit and talk is some strange eclectic blend just like she is, a mix of indie and alternative rock and the deep, gritty heavy metal beats I'm used to. Her hair falls in its careless onyx cascade - she never brushes it - and I spout meaningless political jargon as my eyes slowly roam across the familiar desks and splatters of clothing and my fingers wrap around loose threads of the quilt I'm wrapped in, drinking cherry soda to the tune of Marceline's orignal compositions, and anyone who looked in through the window might think that we're an odd, incongruous pair - we're a chaotic cluster of supernovae and black holes, they might say - when they are simply observers and nothing else. Yes, we clash, but we're still good friends - I wear her t-shirts at night, after all, and I still smell Nightosphere liquor and a dash of anise and clove in the fabric - and we're totally irrational, numbers that shouldn't fit but still do (into the equation).

Marceline and I aren't frenemies, actually. In the end, we're more like friends, buddies, pals, and any other synonym you're capable of dredging up from a tangible or an intangible mental thesaurus. She's a vampire poet and I'm a royal physicist; she sees chaos where I see control, she sends our universe into disarray and I put it back together again, stitching the ripped seams together with needle and thread. We're not mathematics, we're not musical notation, we're not archetypal forces of opposing universal allignments, we're just Marceline and Bubblegum.

(And just for the record, we're not friends with benefits, either.)

We're an impossible juxtaposition of contrary elements who somehow manage to coexist in relative harmony; this is the summation of my various theses.

* * *

Hypothesis: If I study Marceline's personality and character traits extensively, then I shall be able to formulate a profile on her, compare it to my own chart, and finally form a structured explanation of how and why we, the Deadly Duo, should be able to stay in this covalent orbit without ever leaning towards one side in bias.

* * *

When all's said and done, however, I find myself grasping mentally for a suitable conclusion and find that I have only succeeded in exacerbating this conundrum.


End file.
